This is the kind of product that’s nice to use, but gets abandoned a few years later. I don’t see it being open-source, so I’d rather use the other teleprompter apps I see on GitHub.
Re the patent of voice control, does it really sound defendable? That sounds a bit too obvious to be patentable at the level of “observe speaker’s speech and adjust text accordingly”, I’d have thought. Maybe they’ve patented a particular technical approach but now there must be dozens of voice to text models that you could leverage in a slightly different way. I’d love to try the result of something like that.
Seems to get a bit funky if I scroll on the screen while it’s playing. It changes the speed permanently until I reset. The speed slider also seems to invert after that??
I am sure I will need it sometime in the next 2-3-5 years. What’s anyone’s system for saving / remembering a potentially useful tool exists for an activity you do rarely? Like how would I recall I can use this when I need it in the future if I only do things that may require a teleprompter every once in a few years?
I suppose you need your own "search ritual", i.e. write it down in a note-taking app and make it a life rule to check there first for things, in case Past You already put some thought in it.
On mobile Chrome in portrait mode at least, you can't hide the toolbar and have the teleprompter play at the same time. Pressing play hides the option to hide the toolbar, and if you hide the toolbar there is no way to hit play. But hiding the toolbar would make the playing teleprompter much more visible
- "Speed" should change something more akin to characters (as in ems per line, not necessarily of what was typed and rendered) scrolled per second, not just the absolute rate the screen moves. Right now if the user changes the font size it also incidentally changes the speed at which arbitrary text is read. Alternatively: changing one should automatically update the other.
- The text always starts at the very top in certain scenarios, even when the cue starts midway. The text should have a global offset so that everything happens (start and end) relative to the cue, not relative to the screen. (particularly apparent in portrait mode, it's somewhat hacked around in landscape).
- An addon of the previous, although probably a silly case for the most common uses, is if the total displayed text fits in one page it'll never even scroll by at all and instead instantly complete. It could be a good test to see if the above is really working correctly based on the starts/ends or not though.
- The controls run off the page in portrait. Also true if you start the page in portrait and then rotate without reloading (they seem to be sized at the start rather than based on the viewport?).
- It's a bit frustrating when you're trying to adjust settings to test them and it "completes" so automatically closes and moves all of the controls around on you. I'd almost say autoclose-on-complete is an anti-feature (at least as a default) even normally. Another good approach here might be to just always visually anchor the controls to the same spots regardless of the operating state (if not always, at least once launched).
- For some reason I can't use backspace on the text entry area (true for both iPhone and desktop).
- When the page is small you drop the margins, which is good, but the case of words too long for the line is not handled and words can be chopped off with the default settings. Autohypenation for the word wrapping would be nice. A bonus if hyphenation being needed also automatically drops the side margins (like is done when the screen is very small) to make things read better.
- The Dark Mode toggle makes the "Keyboard Shortcuts" section of the page completely unreadable.
- Dark mode doesn't assume the device theme, always starts in light mode. (I'd almost argue a manual toggle shouldn't be prominently needed here - the teleprompter has its own detailed color controls and the user already set their global preference anyways).
- The border-radius of teleprompterDisplay base overlay results in the 4 corners "leaking" small dots of color from the page.
I hope this comes of constructive rather than as a diss. It's a cool page, I'm just not sure it's much better than other free ones on the web quite yet. Hopefully some of these points can help make it that way though!
